Famine and a Fire
by PeregrineTook
Summary: Kvothe isn't the only one seeking revenge for a stolen childhood. This time, he's the target. Set after WMF.
1. Chapter 1

_Hi everyone! Just a head's up: This story is rated T for just about everything you could think of. Long story short, it's pretty dark. So consider yourself warned._

_Also, my husband tells me the last three chapters are better than the first._

_All rights belong to the incomparable Pat Rothfuss._

* * *

"Who s'at?" Sim asked loudly. He rolled his head off his arm, peering over the railing of the Eolian's highest balcony. I followed his gaze, pushing his half-empty glass to the other side of the table as I turned. I wasn't above a little scutten-drowned self-pity, but my pride was still stinging from our last bout of heavy drinking at the Eolian, and the hour it had taken to clean Sim's vomit off my shoes.

I watched Fela make her way up the winding staircase. She moved like a dancer, all carefully placed feet and rolling hips. I caught my eyes slipping down the V of her dress and glanced away hurriedly, shooting Sim a guilty look. But he was still looking past me, his brow furrowed in annoyance.

"What? It's just Fela."

"Behind her, you lush. In the cloak."

I thought it was a bit rich of Simmon to call me a lush. I'd come to play my lute. I would have left hours earlier, if not for Sim's stated desire to "drink like a Modegan diplomat." He'd gotten hard news earlier in the day and was looking to drown it in something as black as his mood. I assume it had something to do with his father, but I knew better than to ask. Wilem had already joined us for a game of corners and left, citing some foolish Cealdish belief that drinking on Mourning meant trouble for a span.

Perhaps the Eolian had more Cealdish patrons than I'd thought. Or perhaps there was a scent in the air, a subtle portent that warned away wiser men than me. For whatever reason, the music hall was uncannily silent that evening. The talented musicians had already performed, and those who hadn't yet earned their pipes weren't willing to pay a silver talent to play to an empty room.

Simmon poked me hard, snapping me out of my reverie, and pointed over my shoulder. I shot him a glare and turned back around, opening my mouth to tell him where he could stick his fingers.

My eye caught the dull whisper of a cloak dragging across the floor. A figure trailed behind Fela, tracking her movements. There was something familiar about the way it moved. Where had I seen … ?

The memory stopped me cold.

_A man with a face obscured by shadows, wreathed in the light of a dying sun. The broken bodies of everyone I ever loved. An admonition. "Send him to the soft and painless blanket of his sleep."_

_Haliax._ I panicked, seizing the handle of the dagger hidden in my pocket. Fortunately, my better judgment caught up with my scutten-slowed body just in time to stop me from flinging myself at Fela in a wildly misguided attempt to save her life again. Haliax in the Eolian? That had the makings of a comedy, not a tragedy.

Fela turned to the cloaked man and pointed in our direction. My fingers relaxed, and I slipped the dagger back into its sheath. He wasn't stalking her. She was leading him to us.

She slid up to the table and tousled Simmon's hair in greeting. His expression slackened as she leaned in, and I tried not to follow his gaze. "God's body," he murmured, swaying slightly in his seat as he admired the low cut of her dress.

Fela shot me an exasperated look. "I thought you were watching out for him."

I adopted a hurt expression. "Now, Fela, surely you aren't suggesting our friend Simmon lacks a sense of moderation? He has simply chosen this evening to undertake a voyage of self-discovery."

"A voyage of self-discovery," she repeated flatly.

"'To know himself, a man must know his limits.'" I quoted Teccam, spreading my arms wide in a seated version of the trouper's second voice of formal oration.

"Very funny. You know, it's your own fault if he—" The cloaked figure behind Fela coughed, and she jumped.

"Oh! Sorry." Fela ushered him forward. "Kvothe, this is Percival. He heard you singing earlier and asked me to introduce you."

I smiled tightly at the man's hood. "A name without a face makes for a poor introduction."

"Kvothe!" Fela scolded.

"Nothing personal," the man said. "An old injury. It puts people off."

His voice, like his halting step, tugged at my memory. "My apologies then. You liked the song?"

"It reminded me of home."

I waved my hand at the empty seat across the table. "And where is home?" I asked.

"Tarbean." He said it the way Waterside street children say it. Taw-bee-in.

Recognition crashed through me then, fear echoing in the hollow it left behind. I remembered his voice. His oily breath. The exploding pain of his forehead slamming into mine.

I remembered his screams as I set him on fire.

"Pike."


	2. Chapter 2

Pike grinned behind the shadow of his hood, then gasped in false surprise. "Wait, _Red_? Is that you?"

Anger boiled in my stomach, pushing away my fear. It wasn't surprising that Pike and his boys thought of me as Red. Trapis was probably the only man in Tarbean that had known my real name, and _red _is just about the first thing people think when they see me. I had met Pike my first day in they city, before my hair had turned dark with soot and smoke. But Red was Ben's name for me. It was a name I loved, a name I had locked away with every other memory of my childhood I hated and cherished. On Pike's lips, it was profane.

"You shouldn't have come here," I said coldly.

Pike just smiled wider. "Don't know what you're talking about. We just came to get some country air. Didn't we, boys?"

I stiffened as four more cloaked figures stepped around the table.

Simmon stared blankly at the men surrounding us. "Kvothe? What's going on?"

Fela chewed her lip and cast her gaze around the balcony. For a moment, I thought she was going to run. Then I realized she wasn't looking for an escape. She was looking for a source of sympathetic power. My heart swelled painfully. _Bless her_.

"Kvothe?" Simmon repeated, his voice growing wilder as one of Pike's boys drew a knife from his sleeve and smiled crookedly, tongue between his teeth. I didn't blame Simmon for being afraid. These boys had the scarred, hungry look of true-bred Watersiders, street children that had survived the years of cold and starvation and fear and come out the other side with dead hearts and dull knives. The leering boy had the shock-white teeth of a denner addict. Sim was right to be afraid.

But my own fear felt shallow, unreal. I realized it was nothing more than an echo of my past, and dismissed it. In many ways, I was the same as the boys surrounding me. I too had survived Tarbean. But I was no Waterside boy with a makeshift blade and a vengeful heart. I was a sympathist, a namer. I had trained with the Adem and called down lightning like Taborlin the Great.

Still, I had my own reason to be afraid. I had put Fela and Sim in danger.

I stared Pike down. "This is between us. Let them go."

"Oh, I don't think so. This is better sport." Pike grinned wider and leaned forward, caressing Fela's cheek. She froze, staring at me with wild eyes. I shook my head. _Don't move_. "You're a mighty pretty lady," Pike murmured. He stroked her throat possessively.

He leaned in close, practically kissing her, and whispered just loud enough that I could hear. "I'm gonna make a penny whore out of you tonight, bitch."

Sim threw himself at Pike with a shout. The boy behind him took a single step forward, seized Sim's arms, and wrenched them behind his back. Sim fell to his knees, twisting in the older boy's grip. There was a loud snap as his shoulder dislocated and he sagged in the boy's arms, groaning.

The efficiency of it surprised me. These weren't just street ruffians with a bone to pick. They were trained thugs, enforcers for the dock gangs that sustained every brothel keeper and sweet-seller Waterside. In Tarbean we called them breakers, and steered clear.

"You've come up in the world," I said flatly.

Pike looked me over. "Not doin' too bad yourself. I like that cloak." His tone told me he looked forward to picking it off my corpse.

My stomach soured at the thought of Pike wearing my beautiful shaed. I leaned forward in my chair. "Think about what you're doing. Far as your boss knows, I'm not worth the shit on his boots. It must have been no trouble getting permission to hunt me down." I pointed at Simmon. "But he's the son of a duke. You do anything to him, and the whole University will come down on you like Taborlin the Great. You want to bring on that kind of heat, just for a little revenge?"

Pike blinked at me. "A little revenge?" he said incredulously.

"Now, don't get me wrong," I continued earnestly. "I'd love to watch some half-prick ganger bend you over a table like a teenage whore. It's just that—"

Pike's brain caught up with my tongue. "You—" Pike spluttered. "You think … _A little revenge?_" He pushed Fela away and stumbled towards me, dragging me out of my chair with two fists buried in my cloak. "You. Set. Me. On. _Fire_," he breathed. He stared down at me with wild eyes.

I smiled, my teeth bared and my eyes hard. I considered jamming my fingers into the hollow of his throat, but it wasn't the time or place and we both knew it. A little drunken late-night tussle wasn't unheard of, even in a well-kept establishment like the Eolian, but five corpses would see me hanged for sure.

"You know how hard it is to get decent work," Pike hissed, "looking like this?"

He pulled back his hood, exposing what remained of his face to the dim light of our balcony. The skin from his collar to his cheeks was a raw, twisted mass of translucent tissue. His left eye socket sagged grotesquely. I wanted to put a knife in it.

"You deserved what you got."

"You set me _on fire_," he roared.

My brittle self-control shattered. Towering, all-consuming rage crashed through my chest. "_You broke my father's lute!_" I cried, tearing away from him. "You put me on the _street_." I gasped for breath. "Three years of sleeping on rooftops. Of begging for pennies and stealing rags and digging half-spoiled food out of the gutter. Three years of cold and fleas and city guards with clubs. _Three. God-damned. Years_."

I drew close, my voice a hoarse whisper. "You thrice-cursed _whoreson. _You came here to kill me? You should have stayed in Tarbean, Pike. Because now I am going to kill _you_. You hear me? I am going to kill you."

Pike's damaged face twisted further. He pulled a knife from a belt sheath beneath his cloak and pointed it at my gut. "Brave words for a dead man." He gestured, and two of the boys grabbed Fela by the shoulders. Her face was an unreadable mask, but I heard her stifle a sob when the third boy yanked Simmon to his feet. His arm hung loosely at his side, and he wasn't standing on his own. I wasn't entirely certain he was conscious.

"What are you going to do?" I snapped. "March us through this place at knifepoint? You think nobody will notice?"

Pike smiled. "Oh, no, I thought I'd take a leaf out of your book. Nat?"

The sweet-eater jumped, his gaze unfocused. "What? Oh, right." He pulled a stick from the bag at his side and tied a rag around it, his fingers twitching with the manic energy of an addict riding a dangerous high. _A torch? What good would that do?_ Then he pulled a bottle out of his cloak, and I understood. _Dreg._

"No," I whispered, horror blossoming in my chest. "Don't do this."

The sweet-eater blinked guiltily at me.

Looking into those vapid eyes, my heart grew cold. I knew him. His name was Nathan. We'd shared bread before, in Trapis's basement. His brother had been badly hurt when I left Tarbean. An infection in his leg. I wondered if Trapis had managed to save him.

"Please don't do this. Nathan. Please."

He cocked his head when I spoke his name. The bottle of dreg danced at the end of his fingers, suspended over the balcony.

Pike brandished his blade at the younger boy. "Come on, you denner freak! What are you waiting for?" Fear flashed across Nat's face, and I watched in mute horror as he shook the entire bottle of dreg onto the cushioned seats below. The balcony was built of old, dry wood, coated in layers of resin. Blackened body of God, it was going to go up like bone-tar in warm air.

Pike grabbed the torch and tossed it over the balcony.

Empty as the Eolian was, it took a minute for anyone to notice the fire. I tracked its spread by the sound of screams and stampeding feet, rather than by sight. As the Eolian's few remaining patrons ran for the main staircase and the gaping front doors, Pike and his boys pushed us towards the smaller staircase at the opposite side of the building, through the shattered remains of a ground-level window I hadn't even know was there. In spite of everything, I was impressed. I hadn't thought Pike capable of this level of planning.

Panicked shouts echoed from Imre's main square to our small recess at the back of the building. I prayed Deoch and Stanchion could stop the fire. My heart sank further as I realized the true extent of the catastrophe Pike had orchestrated. _My lute_.


	3. Chapter 3

If you have ever lived in a city, then it will not surprise you to hear that even Imre had its dark, secret corners—places where sweet-eaters got their fix and pawnshop runners acquired dubious wares, where a rough tussle in a straw bed only cost a drab and copper hawks and street children could settle their debts.

Pike marched us through a labyrinth of back alleys. After the shock of the last several minutes, the walk was surprisingly pleasant. By the time we stopped, I had settled into the Heart of Stone.

I evaluated our situation impassively. Pike had chosen a wide-mouthed alley that tapered jaggedly at the back. It was the sort of unsettling architecture one only encounters in the tangle of streets that sprout organically from cities that have outgrown the land on which they were built. I guessed we were butting up against the river just south of the old stone bridge to the University.

It was a moonless night. The alley was lit by the dancing light of a half-dozen tenement windows. The wind was bitingly cold. It swept through the narrow passage and ricocheted off the walls, forming a vortex at the tight apex twenty feet from where we shifted restlessly, waiting for the silence to break. I cocked my head to the side, listening. I sunk from the Heart of Stone into Spinning Leaf. The transition had become easier in the last few months. These days, I was never far from the name of the wind.

_There_. I suppressed a smile.

The seconds stretched on without event. The nervous energy that surrounded us built into a torrent, until I was certain it would shatter the air. I wondered at the delay. Why was Pike hesitating? Perhaps he had never killed a man.

Nat broke the silence with a whispered curse. He pulled a bent cigarette from one pocket of his cloak and a matchbox from another, lighting up with shaking fingers.

"Tehlu's tits and teeth," Pike snapped. His voice echoed off the walls of our narrow cage.

Nat blushed. "Sorry, Pike. It's just it calms my nerves."

Suddenly, I smiled. "I hear you, Nat. Hell, I could use a cig myself. I don't suppose you'd spare one for a dead man?" I grinned over my shoulder at Pike. "Unless you're afraid of a little fire?"

Pike spat. "I ent afraid of nothin'. Give him the cig, Nat." Pike drew closer and breathed in my face. "I'll feed it to him while I'm gutting him alive."

I just raised an eyebrow and strolled over to Nat. Pike trailed behind, his knife still pointed at my spine. Nat handed me the cigarette, which I held out for Pike to light. For all his talk, he knew better than to hand me a box of matches. He lit the cigarette, then thrust the match into the folds of my shaed, hoping I suppose to light it on fire.

Nothing happened, of course. Nothing, except that the spent match fell into one of the dozens of pockets lining my cloak. Pike grunted in disgust and turned away, gesturing for his boys to surround me. I used the moment's reprieve to lift the matchbox from Nat's cloak, tucking it into my sleeve.

I took a deep drag on the cigarette as Pike and his boys formed their circle. Smoking was a foolish habit I'd never been able to afford. Still, pretenses were pretenses. And it was, at Nat had said, good for the nerves. I felt detached, even peaceful, though whether it was the scutten, the nicotine, or the hypnotic calm of Spinning Leaf, I couldn't say.

I turned to face Pike. "You know your problem?" I asked conversationally. I emptied the matchbox into my cloak pocket with my free hand and sucked in a burning mouthful of smoke. I looked the older boy square in the eye and exhaled in his face. He blinked away the smoke with a curse. A fleeting diversion, but it bought me time to palm a match and toss it at his feet.

"Your problem, Pike," I continued, "is think you think there are only two sorts of people in the world. Rich people and poor people. People with money and people without."

I paced a wide circle around the alley. Every eye was on me. I was a trouper on the stage, at the climax of my act. Pike just didn't know it yet. "You're right, of course." I continued. "There are only two types of people in the world. But money has nothing to do with it." Each time I passed one of Pike's boys, I dropped a match.

I grinned harshly and dug my fingernails into my palm, drawing blood. "Would you like to know the difference, Pike? What separates people like you from people like me?"

Pike spat.

I laughed. It was a faen laugh, rich and high and wild around the edges. I leaned in close, brandishing the cig in Pike's face. "It's power, Pike. Power." I pulled back, turning this over in my mind. "Well, knowledge and power. Knowledge _is_ power, as they say."

Pike laughed and spread his arms wide. "You want to talk about power? Look around you, Nalt."

I snorted derisively. "Believe me, I am. Five street thugs, four dull knives, and not one brain between you. That's not power, Pike. _This_ … this is power."

I closed my bleeding fist around the spent match and called the name of the wind.

The open shutters on either side of the alley slammed shut, pitching us into total darkness.

I focused my Alar on the link between the match in my pocket and the one under the boy holding Fela. It flared to life and I dashed forward, using the brief flicker to find the boy's neck. I extinguished the light before yanking him towards me by the collar, driving my dagger into the soft flesh of his diaphragm.

"Run!" I shouted, dropping the burbling corpse to the ground and charging at the boy holding Sim. I flared a second match just long enough to catch the terror in his eyes before I slit his throat. Inelegant, but it would do.

I grabbed the boy's knife with my free hand and pushed Fela towards the entrance of the alley. She seized Sim's good arm and finally they were running. I prayed they hadn't seen what I had done.

I prayed they would never know what I was about to do.

One of the other boys tried to escape. I dropped him with a flared match and a dagger between his shoulder blades. The match caught his cloak on fire, bathing the alley in warm light and the all-too-familiar stench of burning hair and flesh.

The burning body blocked the entrance to the alley, trapping me in with Pike and Nat. Deep in the Heart of Stone, I felt only the briefest stab of pity when I seized Nat's struggling body to my chest and snapped his neck between my hands.

I lowered him to the ground and turned to Pike. He stumbled, staring at me with primal fear. I imagine now how I must have looked, my wild red hair bathed in firelight, my eyes dark with cold rage, my cloak flaring in the wind, my shirt sprayed with blood.

Pike backed away, brandishing his knife at me feebly. As if it made a difference. I was wind and fire, fury and thunder. I was Kvothe the Bloodless, marked from birth by demon's blood. I wore Felurian's darkness as my cloak. I had faced the Chandrian twice and lived. Pike was nothing but a sniveling, wretched boy. Nothing but the nightmare of my childhood.

I drove him to the back of the alley. When his shoulders hit the brick of the far wall, I expected him to beg for his life. To his credit, he did not.

"You bastard-," he whispered. I knocked the blade from his trembling grip and closed my fingers around his throat, choking him off. I slammed him against the wall, holding his body against mine as it jerked wildly. My lips pulled back over my teeth in a feral grimace. My eyes bore into his. I wanted to see the light in them die.

A sharp pain bloomed in my stomach. Surprised, I glanced down to see a rusted bootknife jammed in my gut. I growled against the pain, tightening my grip.

I wish I could say I took no pleasure in the final erratic spasms of his failing body, the weakening of his pulse beneath the sensitive tips of my trouper's fingers. But that would be a lie.


	4. Chapter 4

I relaxed my grip on Pike's throat, shaking off the mantle of the Heart of Stone. The world reasserted itself with sudden, violent clarity. The stench of burning flesh filled my nostrils. The freezing wind whipped my hair into my mouth, and I gagged on the taste of blood. I stumbled away from the carnage at my feet, doubling over as Pike's blade twisted in my gut. Charred body of god, the _pain_.

I dropped to my knees and crawled forward, using my slim blade to slice Pike's shirt into rags. I set my teeth and pulled the knife out of my stomach, pressing the makeshift bandages down to staunch the blood.

I stumbled from body to body, picking up matches. Five knifed street thugs in an alleyway might look like gang violence, but five knifed street thugs surrounded by matchsticks—well, I didn't know what that would look like to a Justice or the city guard, but I feared that, for a Master at the University, it would bring to mind a certain a mercurial Re'lar with a hidden past, a penchant for fire, and training in hand-to-hand combat. I moved quickly, terrified someone would come to investigate the smell.

I dug through the boys' pockets for anything that implicated me. I took the opportunity to lift loose change and whatever I could pawn, feeling more than slightly disgusted with myself. I have no defense for this behavior, except to say that the habits I developed on the streets of Tarbean have always been the hardest to break. And I suppose, all things considered, it was the least of my sins.

I slid the few items worth keeping into the pockets of my shaed—two jots, five drabs, a good steel knife, and an iron amulet meant to protect its wearer from demons. I wiped blood off of the amulet, turning it over in my hand before tucking it away. Why fear demons, I wondered, when there is already so much to fear from the hearts of men?

Afraid of being seen (or worse, recognized), I took to the rooftops. The corpse burned merrily at my back, lighting my way.

I tied the rags around my stomach, trying not to think about how quickly they were soaking up my blood. The wound was narrow but deep, and the rust on the blade had me worried. I needed antiseptic, and anesthetic if I could get it. I limped from one rooftop to another, grateful that the buildings were packed tightly together in this part of the city.

_There_. I half-climbed, half-fell from the rooftop onto the narrow sill of an apothecary shop window. I slipped pins from my cloak, groping at the latch. It was old and rusted, no trouble for an accomplished thief. Under other circumstances, I could have broken in within seconds. As it was, my fingers were numb from the cold and I was lightheaded from blood loss and pain. I fumbled with the latch for what felt like an hour, but was probably mere minutes.

Finally, the window swung inward and I tumbled through. My fall was broken by several shelves in quick succession. Glass bottles crashed around me and shattered, loud enough to wake every shopkeeper and housewife in Imre.

A bottle of alcohol landed blessedly close to where I lay on the packed dirt of the shop floor, gasping for breath. I wasted no time in uncapping the bottle and pouring its contents over the open wound. Pain seared through me like wildfire in a dry wood, then was gone.

Invigorated by the pain, I staggered to the shelves at the front of the shop. I limped past tiny jars of ophalum and mhenka, searching frantically for a safer palliative. Even in my state, I was not desperate enough to seek relief from denner resin or devil's root.

I grabbed a glass bottle full of dry tennasin powder and ran for the window. I heard the door to the shop fly open just as I reached the rooftop across the street.

I headed for the river, resting only when I was nestled in the shadow of the great stone pillars of the bridge to the University. Finally safe, I unwrapped the bloody bandages around my stomach and examined my wound.

I swallowed what I hoped was two scruples worth of tennasin, nervously recounting its symptoms in my head. _Anaesthetic, vasoconstrictor. Can cause delirium and fainting_. I pulled a needle and gut from a small case in my pocket, thankful for once that experience had taught me better than to travel without it. I started sewing immediately, afraid to wait for the tennasin to take effect. Fortunately, it worked quickly. By the time I tied off the thread, my body had gone pleasantly numb. I cut up my shirt to bandage the wound and stumbled into the Omethi to wash off the blood.

In hindsight, this was probably the worst thing I could have done. I was too numb to feel the cold, and too disoriented to realize it. Submerged to my chest in frigid river water, I watched my body grow clumsier with only a mild, incoherent curiosity. I remember staring at my shaking fingers and wondering why no one had mentioned this was a side effect of tennasin. I might have died in the river that night, if not for the deepening lethargy that accompanies the onset of hypothermia, which prompted me to crawl to the riverbank and under the rescuing warmth of my shaed.

My reaction to the tennasin was far stronger than it should have been. To this day, I do not know whether it was brought on by blood loss, overdose, or a strong allergic reaction. Whatever the reason, within an hour I had been seized by a complete and terrifying delirium.

My heart raced, denying me the salvation of sleep, and yet I felt as if I were in a terrible dream from which I could not wake. I dreamed I was in Tarbean again, being chased by older boys with bottleglass knives. I dreamed the Chandrian had come for me at last. I dreamed the Masters had discovered the corpses in the alley (was it five? or was it a dozen? a hundred?). I dreamed I had been expelled for malfeasance. I dreamed they had hanged me by the fountain in Imre. Sim and Wilem and Fela had been there, and Elodin and Kilvin and Elxa Dal. I had seen fear in their eyes, for they finally knew the truth of me.

Worst of all, I dreamed I had been discovered by the other students, sleeping under the bridge in filthy rags. I drowned in shame and self-hatred and fear, so much of it I thought I would die.

One dream was not like the others. I dreamed Auri had found me, shivering and crying and so terribly afraid. She had knelt before me and washed my bloody skin with water warmed in the afternoon sunlight of a distant meadow. She had swaddled me in a blanket made of hearthstone, heavy and safe and warm. She had laid her head against my chest and told me the most lovely stories about the most ordinary things. The owls were bickering again, which was causing some consternation among the other creatures in the Underthing. But she was certain they would come to an agreement, like old couples will do. The fireflies had danced for her on the bridge. They had been lonely before she came, and they were such terrible show-offs.

Her words created a world in my head, a world I so desperately wanted to exist that knowing it did not had made it difficult to breathe. I had cried. She had kissed away my tears, one after another, and I had finally fallen asleep to the warm, fleeting touch of her lips on my forehead, my cheeks, my neck, my lips …

I woke to the worst headache I've ever had in my life, and the sound of birds chirping in the bushes nearby. The sun was just about to rise. I reached up to rub the sleep from my eyes and froze, startled to see that my hands were perfectly clean. A thick woolen blanket slipped from my shoulders as I sat up and prodded the tight, clean bandages wrapped around my stomach. The bloody rags I'd been using were gone, along with the tattered remnants of my shirt.

My lute case was perched on a rock to my left. On top of the case was a change of clothes. Pinned to the white linen shirt was a scrap of parchment. Two words were written on it in flawless cursive. _My Ciridae_.


End file.
